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RNET Rebuild – 2022 – 0

It’s not that I don’t like what I’ve done, but it’s that I feel I could do better. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot recently and want to give it another show. So the next couple posts are really just going to be progress updates, detailing what I have achieved.

I’ve been thinking of this for quite a while now, and I kinda have a plan in my head on how I want to go about it now.

There are a couple things I can rattle off the top of my head;

  • I’m using ZFS on-top of a RAID controller (Dell iPerc), which in hindsight is kinda silly. I want to switch to simple directory based storage for Proxmox
  • I’m not properly using Link Aggregation on the servers. I want to utilise this
  • I’m not using VLAN’s enough, I want to split my networks based on their level of security / access.
  • I can’t migrate VM’s between hosts on my Proxmox Cluster because of some weird ZFS naming issue, which I am attributing to ZFS.
  • Booting the cluster from zero takes freaking forever because of some Quorum issue. Will be adding a third server as a cold standby to help with this while others get rebooted.
  • DHCP is not Highly Available
  • LDAP is not Highly Available

While rebuilding all of this, I want effectively near zero perceived downtime from people using the servers. That means I’ll need to use the third (slightly less powerful) server to host critical things. While I rebuild the two main servers. Once they’re rebuilt, I’ll rebuild the third one to a blank Proxmox install and add that to the cluster.

I have a couple other servers that don’t sit in the server rack, which I can use a Proxmox Test servers. Anyway, let’s build our stand-in server.

Stand In Server

I’ve installed a fresh copy of Proxmox V7.2-7 onto a Dell R710, equipped with a single Xeon E5506 and 16G of memory. It’s not ideal, but it was really just the test server. It should be good though. If I have performance issues, I have a couple Xeon 5 series sitting around but I recall having some BIOS issue with them, can’t exactly remember.

I’ve set up a simple network aggregation using LACP (802.3ad) for 3 ethernet ports to a Dell PowerConnect 6224, leaving one remain to be used for WAN when I decomm the current PfSense VM.

Proxmox is installed on mirrored hard drives, with an additional hard drive used for VM’s. I’ll probably look into getting mirrored drives for VM’s but I don’t have many spare laying around unfortunately. I’ll have the VM’s backed up on my computer anyway, plenty of storage here.

The stand-in server also has a Dell iPerc RAID controller, so I’m going to be using that. Proxmox will be configured for simple directory based storage.

I’m thinking the first thing I need to get across is LDAP. Would be a good exercise for highly available LDAP which I intend to implement in the future, along with KeepAliveD to manage that.

These things, they take time

I don’t plan on writing long posts detailing major updates. So the next post will cover LPAP, when I complete it. Unless I get distracted and do something else.

I’ll update this post to include a link to the following post, when it’s published.

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